JSngry

Thanks for the tips! I (and I guess it's because I'm a drummer/percussionist) tend to do what you're talking about from a rhythmic standpoint, but I'm usually all for leaving the melody intact. But, when you're talking stuff like Metallica, where the melody is certainly almost never the main selling point of the tune, you might as well tweak the hell out of that too, right? So, again, thanks! Well, if you have the time, the tweaking can go all the way out and then back in again. Depends on where you are when you reach that point of "Yeah, tha's it".

REISSUE BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!!!!

Did somebody say "probeity"?

You wanna come over when I open the next electric bill?

K. Drew, NHOP, Albert Heath.

Everybody expected Sonny to come back with a "new approach" in '61 or whenever it was. He didn't. He came back with a perfected old approach and rapidly showed how advanced his technique had become in the interim, how those "abstract" ideas he toyed with in the late '50s could now be fully & confidently exponded upon. That says to me that his oft-expressed dissatisfaction with his abilities was real, and that "bridge" sabaatical" was about improving as a player. None of which is inconsistent with any "feeling the heat" from Trane (with whom he was already a longtime friend, as I understand it) or anybody else. If anything, it's wholly consistent with it in that if you feel the need to compete and you get the sense that the bar is about to be raised, you take it upion yourself to go away and hone your skills as much as they can be honed so you can play your game best - not somebody else's as it can be played. Too much misunderstood emphasis has been placed on the "gladiator" aspect of jazz. Except for a few really malicious individuals (and Sonny at one point, around markedly lesser players, might have been one of them...he makes no qualms that he used to be one evil cat), the competition, which is very real, is ultimately not about destroying others but about making yourself better/stronger. Or at least it used to be. Rollins & Trane had a love for each other, dig? There was no "Everybody thinks this cat's better than me, I gotta knock him out" attitude. It's more like, "Hey, Trane is really bringin' it. I better up my game if I want to stay in the ring" Fwiw, those Moon sides of Newk in Denmark from 1968 are just about the most at-peace-with-myself Rollins I've ever heard. Simply amazing, they are. And good Rollins of the last 35 or so years is some of the most purely joyous music I've ever heard. So the journey, no matter how strange & erratic it has been, has been rewarded.

At one point they were released (don't remember if on Crown or not) with personnel listed on the front of the cover.

Why should everything always be the same, every day, forever?

That's some funny shit!

Bunny Briggs?

Finally found those two in FW, late '70s. Delightful I got thru mail-order. Ten bucks or something like that.

It was a killer single LP... Get the Silver City box for the best of the 70s/80s stuff, Shortest distance between two points.

Yeah, only Verve & MGM were separate entities at the time. But htats for the ners. I always found it weird that Brass/Trio was sorta always there in reissue form (remember all the sensibly priced Japanese Verve LP imports of the late 70s/early 80s?) but the Music Inn date was treated like it never even existed. Even during the CD boom it was ignored until the VME, and then tacked on as an afterthought. But that was before I learned that it was only half a lp... Listening to it now, and...it's ok, but...Sonny sounds like he's accommodating Lewis & Kay (and oh BTW, no Bags on these cuts, I forgot about that). Maybe it was the setting, maybe it was the accompaniment,I don't know, but it doesn't sound like unfettered Sonny to me...like the mind is really free. "Limehouse" is like he's practically begging Kay to join in, and then when he doesn't (no snare drum, wtf?), downshifts into an A+ version of B+ Rollins. Or the other way around...Gorgeous tone on "You are Too Beautiful", though. To die for. The thing I've noticed about Rollins from 58 & 59 is that you can often hear him start to flirt with more abstract phrasologies & tonal shadings, but then he pulls back and goes into what by then was becoming some (for him) pretty predictable mechanisms...as if he knew where he wanted to be but didn't yet have a handle on it yet, which makes the sabbatical perfectly logical, as does the staggering virtuosity of the best 60s work, where abstraction and hard swing are often present in devastating measure.

7 CDs is too much for me, but damn, Bing Crosby is worthy, make no mistake. Now, when can we get some Ethel Waters?

Ok, the other Rollins/MJQ side (not counting the earlier encounter on Prestige...): Sonny Rollins At Music Inn/Teddy Edwards at Falcoln's Lair With Joe Castro Metrojazz SE 1011 Only place to get it (and w/o the Teddy Edwards half of the album (still not on CD at all AFAIK, at least not legitmately) is on the VME of the Big Brass date, wher is is all but ignored in the packaging and barely touched upon in the liner notes. French 10" LP, minus the Teddy Edwards cutes:

Nope, the Big Brass album is another one altogether, at least as an LP. One side w/big band (ar. Ernie Wilkins), the other a trio w/Grimes &...who? I forget... but the other Music Inn date w/the MJQ was origianlly half a side of a Metro LP (IIRC) & only saw CD issue as part of a Big Brass reissue...one fo the Verve Deluxe Editions, or what ever they called them....

There was one on Verve (Metro, actually, IIRC) too...but not as good as the one on Atlantic, although truthfully, both are towrds the bottom "go to" Rollins list...the "thematic improvisation" tact had begun to become a little sefl-conscious to my ears (and in Sonny's later acknowledgement), & Lewis' comping feeds it even more. but stuill, they're better than a lot of other things by other people nevertheless

I'm wondering how much of an original pressing run they kept on hand at HQ, and how much they sent out straight to distributors. There's also gepographic consideratins as well...I'm sure that the urban northeast distributors got more up front than did other parts of the country.

That's another one that was a real bear for me to find to find in the 70s. Charisma, too. Seems like those three came and went w/o much residue...

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